The «Communes» campaign has posed a fundamental problem for the Marxist interpretation of the development from a semi-feudal economy to a capitalist economy. First of all, we need to grasp clearly that in China, as in every other country with a feudal or semi-feudal economy, the historical problem is that of creating a capitalist economy, since it is impossible to skip a whole stage of economic development. Only when the material bases are created – and the creation of these bases is the task of capitalism, in this case of state capitalism – will Chinese society, and for it the new revolutionary class created by industrialisation, i.e. the proletariat, be mature enough to raise the problem of the socialist management of its economy.
